PLU-E: a proposed framework for planning and conducting evaluation studies with children.

While many models exist to support the design process of a software development project, the evaluation process is far less well defined and this lack of definition often leads to poorly designed evaluations, or the use of the wrong evaluation method. Evaluations of products for children can be especially complex as they need to consider the different requirements and aims that such a product may have, and often use new or developing evaluation methods. This paper takes the view that evaluations should be planned from the start of a project in order to yield the best results, and proposes a framework to facilitate this. This framework is particularly intended to support the varied and often conflicting requirements of a product designed for children, as defined by the PLU model, but could be adapted for other user groups

Smartphone-based vase design: a developing creative practice

peer-reviewedThis article describes a developing creative practice whereby digital creative processes adapted from mobile music making are used in the data driven design and subsequent digital instantiation of ceramic vessels. First, related work in mobile music creation and recent developments in the digital design and fabrication of ceramics frames the research and puts it in a broad context. A pilot study is then detailed, concluding that although largely successful, a number of areas of the process needed to be improved and refined. The results of a further iteration of the process, consisting of the digital creation and instantiation of location-specific vessels is presented, before the current state of the research, where ceramic vessels are 3D printed, is outlined. We show that mobile phones can become integral to a practical design process that allows the digital forms it creates to be instantiated using 3D printing, and that these become high-quality, end-use artefacts. The final section discusses what has been learned and contemplates how the described practice will be developed yet further

Mobile Life: A Research Foundation for Mobile Services

The telecom and IT industry is now facing the challenge of a second IT-revolution, where the spread of mobile and ubiquitous services will have an even more profound effect on commercial and social life than the recent Internet revolution. Users will expect services that are unique and fully adapted for the mobile setting, which means that the roles of the operators will change, new business models will be required, and new methods for developing and marketing services have to be found. Most of all, we need technology and services that put people at core. The industry must prepare to design services for a sustainable web of work, leisure and ubiquitous technology we can call the mobile life. In this paper, we describe the main components of a research agenda for mobile services, which is carried out at the Mobile Life Center at Stockholm University. This research program takes a sustainable approach to research and development of mobile and ubiquitous services, by combining a strong theoretical foundation (embodied interaction), a welldefined methodology (user-centered design) and an important domain with large societal importance and commercial potential (mobile life). Eventually the center will create an experimental mobile services ecosystem, which will serve as an open arena where partners from academia and industry can develop our vision an abundant future marketplace for future mobile servíces

The User Experience of Mobile Music Making: An Ethnographic Exploration of Music Production and Performance in Practice

The research herein describes the investigation of usability of software and hardware tools for musicians. Through an ethnographic approach, the aim is to broaden the scope of investigation and measure the usability of tools for musicians in a real world setting. Six musicians are observed through the planning and preparation stages, rehearsals, performing and post-performance in order to better understand the tools that they use and how these tools could be improved. This work builds on previous investigations into more traditional production environments. This investigation also explores how requirements and tools have changed. The research highlights main areas of usability problems in navigation, clarity of expression, problems in understanding flow and a mismatch between requirements and software tools that currently exist. The results highlight strengths in the flexibility of such systems and identify where they solve traditional, hardware based problems. The paper culminates in a discussion regarding the values, strengths and weaknesses of hard and soft tools and points to potential future directions of research

WIJAM: a mobile collaborative improvisation platform under Master-players Paradigm

Music jamming is an extremely difficult task for musical novices. Trying to extend this meaningful and highly enjoyable activity to a larger recipient group, we present WIJAM, a mobile application for an ad-hoc group of musical novices to perform improvisation along with a music master. In this master-players' paradigm, the master offers a music backing, orchestrates the musical flow, and gives feedbacks to the players; the players improvise by tapping and sketching on their smartphones. We argue that this paradigm can be a significant contribution to the possibility of music playing by a group of novices with no instrumental training leading to decent musical results.published_or_final_versio

Click, play and save: The iGamelan as a tool for music-culture sustainability

This article explores the potential for web-based interactive music resources to represent and sustain music-culture heritage via digital means. Our focus is the University of Otago's virtual Indonesian gamelan (iGamelan): an immersive online resource featuring interactive musical instruments, an audio-video gallery, and information archive. Designed in 2010-2011 for use within the tertiary education context, the iGamelan stands alone as an innovative learning/teaching tool, and also enhances real-life instructional sessions with the University's pelog/slendro Central Javanese gamelan. This article illuminates the pitfalls and achievements of the iGamelan project and, at a broader level, demonstrates how contemporary technology can help sustain active music-making cultures

faust2api: a Comprehensive API Generator for Android and iOS

International audienceWe introduce faust2api, a tool to generate custom DSP engines for Android and iOS using the Faust programming language. Faust DSP ob jects can easily be turned into MIDI-controllable polyphonic synthesizers or audio effects with built-in sensors support, etc. The various elements of the DSP engine can be accessed through a high-level API, made uniform across platforms and languages. This paper provides technical details on the implementation of this system as well as an evaluation of its various features

Speculative designs: towards a social music

This paper introduces a collaborative research project in which the authors explored the possibilities of music making using social media. We aimed for this music to reflect the various genres born of social media, for example the selfie, the tweet, the emoticon. Our research was therefore propelled by questions like “what might a musical selfie sound like?” and “how might an audio emoticon extend the language of online communication”? This project explored the potential of speculative design, or “design fictions”, in the creation of new musical interfaces. Overall, the project revealed the vast potential for new kinds of music making in today’s socially networked world

Data Driven Analysis of Tiny Touchscreen Performance with MicroJam

The widespread adoption of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, has made touchscreens a common interface for musical performance. New mobile musical instruments have been designed that embrace collaborative creation and that explore the affordances of mobile devices, as well as their constraints. While these have been investigated from design and user experience perspectives, there is little examination of the performers' musical outputs. In this work, we introduce a constrained touchscreen performance app, MicroJam, designed to enable collaboration between performers, and engage in a novel data-driven analysis of more than 1600 performances using the app. MicroJam constrains performances to five seconds, and emphasises frequent and casual music making through a social media-inspired interface. Performers collaborate by replying to performances, adding new musical layers that are played back at the same time. Our analysis shows that users tend to focus on the centre and diagonals of the touchscreen area, and tend to swirl or swipe rather than tap. We also observe that while long swipes dominate the visual appearance of performances, the majority of interactions are short with limited expressive possibilities. Our findings are summarised into a set of design recommendations for MicroJam and other touchscreen apps for social musical interaction

Patterns of Musical Interaction with Computing Devices

In line with the efforts from the Ubiquitous Music Group, our research identified recurring patterns of interaction between humans and computing devices in existing music software and hardware. These four kinds of repeatedly implemented musical interactions are being documented in the form of interaction design patterns, providing an alternative taxonomy of interaction types, suitable for musical and computational developments in ubiquitous music research. In this paper we briefly describe the meaning of patterns in design fields. We also defend the use of interaction patterns in the design of ubiquitous music systems, and present the four proto-patterns proposed in our research. We intend with this paper to foster discussions at this 3rd Ubimus workshop, which can lead to refinement and improvement of the proposed interaction design patterns